A person who decides to participate in a Week of Accompanied Prayer agrees to pray on their own for half an hour each day for five days, and to meet with a Prayer Guide daily. The Prayer Guide is a spiritual director or someone trained especially in this work. The Prayer Guide supports the Pilgrim (as the participant is called) by suggesting ways of praying and material to pray with. The daily meetings with the Prayer Guides are for up to half an hour, during which the Pilgrim shares how they have got on in their times of personal prayer with special reference to their felt experience.
Weeks of Accompanied Prayer take place in your daily life: you don’t have to go away to do them. But because the Week is a special time of prayer and discernment, it is like being on retreat, even though you are still going to work, being at home with the family etc. So, a ‘retreat in daily life’ is a very suitable description. Other people will use the term, Retreat in Daily Life, to describe something that in style is very similar, but instead of happening over one week, it may take place over five or six weeks, and instead of the Guide and Pilgrim meeting daily, they will meet once a week during the time. The main difference for many people involved, however, in the longer Retreat in Daily Life, and a major difference if this is how it is understood, is that a Retreat in Daily Life is rooted in the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius of Loyola.
Spiritual Director, experienced retreat leader, and APR Trustee, Revd Alison Christian, has written an excellent introduction, which clearly outlines what to expect if you attend a Week, and (for potential leaders) how you might approach organising one in your own parish context. You can download it here. Writing from her own experiences, this is a very accessible document, clearly laid out, and full of simple, but effective, advice. It contains a number of links to other resources that can accessed online, including these links to leaflets produced by the Retreat Association.
